Month: February 2019

Enlarge / You can't legitimately access this Fallout 76 vault yet, but you can take a peek inside. (credit: McStaken / Reddit)

Bethesda has confirmed that a locked vault in Fallout 76 will eventually open, but the admission came only after a player was briefly trapped in the locked area due to an in-game glitch.

The saga started this weekend when Reddit user McStaken posted pictures from inside the mysterious vault, which appears on the Fallout 76 map but can't be entered through normal gameplay. McStaken said he "didn't intend to end up" in the vault and entered accidentally while participating in another event.

That makes their situation different from previous players who have been able to force their way into Vault 63 and other locked in-game locations using a Power Armor glitch. Once inside, these players found a spacious, partially furnished vault, complete with overseer's office, wrecked kitchen, and even a terminal reading "Nice Work Assholes" (a possible hidden message for potential hackers?).

Enlarge / Archaeologists use a portable X-ray fluorescence detector to analyze 900-year-old artifacts. (credit: Xu et al. 2019)

Sometime in the late 12^th century CE, a merchant ship laden with trade goods sank off the coast of Java. The 100,000 ceramic vessels, 200 tons of iron, and smaller amounts of ivory, resin, and tin ingots offer a narrow window onto a much broader world of global trade and political change. The merchant vessel that sank in the Java Sea was the pointy tip of a very long spear, and a new study sheds some light on the trade networks and manufacturing industry hidden behind its cargo—all thanks to a little help from a cool X-ray gun.

Sailing ancient trade routes

There was a network of trade routes that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean and South China Sea by the late 12^th century, linking Song Dynasty China to far-flung ports in Japan and Southeast Asia to the east, Indonesia to the south, and the Middle East and eastern Africa to the west. Merchant ships carried crops, raw materials like metals and resin, and manufactured goods like ceramics along these routes. Today, ceramics are a common sight in shipwrecks in these waters, partly because the material outlasts most other things on the seafloor, and partly because of the sheer volumes that could be packed into the holds of merchant ships from around 800 CE to 1300 CE.

Archaeologists have found Chinese ceramics at sites stretching from Japan to the east coast of Africa. And excavations in Southeast China have unearthed several kiln complexes, each with hundreds of dragon kilns—long tunnels dug into hillsides, which could fire up to 30,000 ceramic pieces at a time—clustered into a few square kilometers. All that production was aimed at exporting ceramic bowls, boxes, and other containers to overseas markets. “Most ceramics from this region are seldom recovered from domestic settings in China and are almost exclusively found along the maritime trading routes,” Field Museum archaeologist Lisa Niziolek, a co-author on the study, told Ars Technica.

Enlarge / Nuro Founders Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu. (credit: Nuro/Greylock)

The autonomous delivery startup Nuro has raised $940 million from The Softbank Vision Fund, making it one of the most lavishly funded startups in the driverless car sector. The news comes after Nuro became one of the first startups in the world to begin operating a fully driverless commercial service on public roads.

Under a deal announced last year, a Kroger-owned Fry's Foods store in the Phoenix area is using Nuro's technology to deliver groceries to nearby customers. Initially, the deliveries were conducted by modified Toyota Priuses. But in December, Nuro added two custom-designed robots to its fleet. These robots are smaller than a conventional car and are fully driverless—they don't even have space inside for a human driver to sit.

"Our goal this year is to really scale to an entire city worth of operation," CEO Dave Ferguson told Ars last week.